'We used to go to the climate conferences together. We are not anymore': ESA official Simonetta Cheli tells us how the political landscape for Earth observation is changing

FRASCATI, Italy — Observing Earth from space provides a much-needed insight into the evolution of our planet’s health. This is particularly important in the face of climate change, as environmental degradation, food insecurity and extreme weather events can all reveal themselves in stark images taken from high above our planet’s surface.

Simonetta Cheli is the director of Earth observation programs at the European Space Agency (ESA) and the head of the European Space Research Institute (ESRIN) in Frascati, Italy. With nearly 40 years of experience in the field, she is one of the world’s leading experts on Earth observation.

Live Science spoke with Cheli on a recent visit to ESRIN to talk about why Earth observation is so important, how NASA budget cuts and political changes have altered the picture, and why private space satellites risk our ability to view the planet clearly. She also discussed how new supercomputers, like ESRIN’s newly operational Space HPC, are helping to process vast amounts of data like never before — and shared her favorite recent satellite snap of our planet

Simonetta Cheli became ESA’s director of Earth observation programs and head of ESRIN on Jan. 1, 2022, more than three decades after joining the agency. She was born in Siena, Italy, and went on to study law and economics at Yale University before gaining a degree in political sciences at the University ‘Cesare Alfieri’ in Florence, Italy. She also holds a diploma of advanced studies from the Centre d’Etudes Diplomatiques et Stratégiques in Paris.

(Image credit: ESA)

We launched the first mission [ERS-1] in 1991. Today, just here at ESRIN, we manage over 20 missions and are planning more than 40 more. We have also launched three different missions in the last three weeks — one to look at how oceanography impacts extreme weather events [International Report for an Innovative Defence of Earth]; one to monitor the fluorescence and health status of vegetation [Fluorescence Explorer]; and one to measure temperature on land and sea [Sentinel-3C], which was a super useful thing this summer.

To tackle climate and environmental stability, you cannot just do things alone at the national level. You have to share data and work with everybody in the world, where you have to have common objectives. For example, what happens to Greenland affects everybody on Earth, not just the people who live there. So the collaboration, I think, is very much inherent in our daily job at ESA and between our partners.

SC: We are worried because we see that the anti-collision maneuvers are increasing and increasing. When my mission manager tells me we have to move the satellite because there is a risk of collision with another satellite, we have to go check with ESO [European Southern Observatory] in Germany, and then the operations center moves the satellite. And the number [of times we’ve done this] has certainly increased in the last four or five years due to the increased number of satellites up there.

This is linked to, for example, trying to have a space debris policy; trying to have enough propellant on board of the satellites that we build to make sure that once they finish their lifetime, they come back with a re-entry assist and they don’t stay there in orbit. And the same is true in the launcher domain, where there’s a very strong effort from our partners in French Guiana [where ESA’s only active launch site is located] to lessen our impact as much as possible on the environment with the launch setup.